Why Is It Hard To Lose Weight In Menopause

There are lots of myths about weight gain, weight loss and dieting, but the most damaging is that it’s all about willpower. “If only I had a stronger willpower”, people say to themselves, “I would eat more healthily and become slim again”. If you believe that then you will also believe that if you are fat then it is all your own fault.

So, you go on a diet and when it fails (which many do) then naturally you blame yourself. You get depressed, gorge on carbs and give up.

The fact is that experts who work in weight loss management are well aware that weight loss is about far more than simply trying to eat fewer calories. Most overweight people have a metabolic problem, one that makes them hungry all the time. The normal feedback mechanisms that tell you that you are full no longer work. Willpower fails because you are up against one of the most basic drives we have, hunger.

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This metabolic problem will not only stop you losing weight, it will also lead to serious health problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. Unless you do something about it this is a problem that will get worse over time.

Once you solve the metabolic problem (and the good news is that it can be solved) your appetite will shrink and you will find it not only easier to lose weight but to keep it off.

At the heart of weight gain is the hormone, insulin. One of the main reasons why so many people struggle to lose weight is not because they are idle or greedy but because their muscles have become resistant to insulin.

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Insulin is a hormone produced by your pancreas. It controls your blood sugar levels, but it does far more than that. It also controls fat storage. When you eat a meal, particularly one that is rich in sugary carbs, your insulin levels go up.

Insulin’s job is to bring down the fat and sugar that you’ve absorbed from your meals and which is now circulating in your blood. Ideally it would push those excess calories into cells like your muscles to be burnt as fuel. But if you are “insulin resistant” then your muscles find it hard to absorb these calories. Instead they get dumped into your fat cells.

The trouble is, your body still craves fuel, so you will soon start feeling hungry again. So you eat, again. But because you are insulin resistant many of the calories you absorb get diverted into your fat cells. You get fatter but still stay hungry. 

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Once you have become insulin resistant your pancreas will have to start pumping out ever larger amounts of insulin to get your blood sugar levels down. Higher insulin means more fat storage, particularly fat around the tummy (abdominal fat). What happens next depends on your Personal Fat Threshold (the amount of fat you can carry before you start having serious health problems).

As you get fatter, so does your liver and pancreas. As fat invades these organs it starts to interfere with your body’s ability to produce insulin. So your average blood sugar levels start to creep up. You have prediabetes; you are not yet a diabetic, but there is a high chance that unless you do something about it you will become one. Raised levels of blood sugar are bad for your arteries, your heart and your nerves, even when they are not yet in the diabetic range.

The fat that infiltrates your liver may also, in time, lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and some to liver failure. NAFLD is now the commonest cause of liver disease in the West and over a third of people in the UK or US have it. Around 20% of all liver transplants are now for NAFLD. People tend to develop it in middle-age and there is currently no effective drug treatment.

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Rising levels of abdominal fat also produces chronic inflammation throughout the body such as increased heart disease and damage to large and small blood vessels, it is associated with raised CRP and common inflammatory disorders.

Your blood pressure may rise, along with triglycerides (a form of fat that circulates in your blood). The combination of raised blood sugar, abdominal fat, triglycerides and blood pressure is known as metabolic syndrome. It puts you at high risk of heart disease and stroke.

Insulin resistance commonly start in your muscles when you are younger. The muscles are where a lot of the energy you consume are burnt up. If you are very active then when you do eat food which causes a spike in blood sugar, it is mopped up and used by the muscles before it causes problems.

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When you eat a bit too much and do too little exercise, fat builds up inside your muscles. This is why we strongly encourage people to also increase their activity levels alongside the diet and move more, as this will enhance the improvement in blood sugar levels, reversing diabetes and metabolic syndrome and improve general wellbeing and health.

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The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.Maybe you’ve tried to lose weight before and struggled until you gave up. Maybe you lost some weight but found that you eventually gained some (or all) of it back. Losing weight is hard, but not impossible. If you understand what makes it so hard, you can create a strategy for yourself to make it a little easier and to ensure your success.

If you scan the aisles at any supermarket you’ll see tons of labels touting benefits like “fat-free” and “low carb” and the like. And it’s hard to determine what’s ACTUALLY good for you when you’re reading all these confusing and misleading claims.

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Solution: Stick to foods with lots of natural ingredients (try to avoid eating anything with ingredients you can’t pronounce, for example) and make the majority of what you consume unprocessed foods, as these are less likely to have adverse effects on your weight loss efforts. (Here’s a great list of 21 reasons to eat unprocessed foods.)

How many times do we find ourselves scrapping plans to workout because “something came up” or because something took us longer to do than we expected? And how often do we grab foods “on-the-go” because we’re on-the-go, and their not the best choices?

Solution: PLAN ahead. Include your workouts in your plan for the day or the week. Write them down in your planner so they’re appointments and not simply intentions (the best intentions…). And PLAN when it comes to your food. Make sure you have lots of healthy (and unprocessed!) foods on hand for when things get a little crazy so you’re not tempted to hit the drive throughout of convenience.

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The supermarket checkout lanes are lined with magazines offering advice on how to lose weight and get fit. Facebook is full of suggestions, ideas and products to help you get the body of your dreams. The problem with all this information surrounding us is that only a small percentage of that information is good information, and of the good information, only a percentage of that applies to our individual goals and bodies.

Solution: Don’t fall in with every trend or simply follow the “latest information” blindly. Meet with a personal trainer if you can and get a program that is specifically designed for you.

We think that we can out train a bad diet. Or we think that we can starve ourselves and sit on the sofa and get the results we want. The reality is that we have to have a balanced approach that works with our lifestyles and preferences to get the bodies we want.

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Solution: Same as #3 – meet with a trainer and determine what expectations are realistic for you based on your body type, your experience, and your goals.

We think that we should see results a lot more quickly than is realistic (see #4) and we think that we should lose weight a lot more quickly than we gained it. Of course, this is because our expectations are off, but also because we’re impatient.

Solution: don’t judge your success based on your end goal. For example, if your goal is to lose

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